Blogmas 2016 - December 9-15: Bad News or Good News First?

This post is a mixture of good and bad. That's life, though, ya know? Now that the week is over a lot of the bad news has bee nullified, but it still messed up my mood for the week!

First, though, some cute and happy happenings!
I cleaned the hamster homes and this time around I took two pictures. The first one you can see above. It's from Hammy scurrying around the bits of her home as they laid scattered on her desk. She even decided to jump from the desk to the floor while I had my hands full with wiping down her home. Methinks she has spent too much time taking skydiving lessons from Bunny. LOL!

I think I can confidently say we have fully tamed Hammy. She is comfortable with us touching and picking her up whether she is inside or outside her home, and she eats food out of both of our hands quite readily. It's hard to believe this is the same hamster we had in July, who scurried around scared and hated being touched or picked up.

I made a mistake while cleaning Bunny's home. I put the big container that I store their food in on the dresser her home is on while cleaning. Since I give them free reign on their desk/dresser their homes are on while I'm taking apart and cleaning their homes, she had no problem finding and getting into the food container and helping herself. Such a naughty Bunny!

Bunny is still a very calm hamster. I'm happy to see that she's warmed up to M a lot. She used to refuse to eat out of his hand and did not seem to like him being near her while she was in her home. Now she extends that same friendliness to him that I receive. M has been accepted in our little hamster pack, yaaay!

Okay, on to the less happy stuff.

Friday the 9th, M and I went to the post office to inquire about a package we were concerned about. There were two packages shipped to us at the same time and while one arrived safe and sound, the other one seemed to disappear after it was scanned at the destination PO. That destination scan is the last scan we can see as customers, and for us to still not receive the package after almost a week was incredibly weird. We'd even had packages come in after that particular one and we were able to pick it up.

That package disappeared. Nobody could find it, and nobody remembered it. On Monday, we were asked to give the exact contents of the package for liability purposes and they started one final step in trying to locate the package. If that step didn't turn up anything, an official investigation would have been opened. That package had our Christmas gifts from our family, so to say we are bummed by the situation would be a little bit of an understatement. M and I were trying not to get our hopes up but we couldn't wrap our head around a worker at the post office being stupid enough to steal a package when its location and handlers are so heavily tracked. It has to be a silly oversight and the package is still intact but misplaced, right? At least, those were our thoughts.

Tuesday the 13th I spent a huge chunk of the day figuring out my Sims 3 installation/game. I apologize right now for those of you who don't care about tech/video game things, because here comes an essay. LOL!

I have 3 drives on my computer. The first is a 150gb SSD that my OS is running off of and one or two select games that have the benefit of running extra smoothly since they're running off an SSD. My old drive from my pre-2016 computer build is also attached to the computer.  It has 1 TB of space and is where I save all of my games when I install them. I also have a 3TB drive, where I store all pictures and videos I take, as well as back up any files for school/life that I would like to have in case their main save location becomes corrupted.

When I switched to my SSD, I discovered some difficulties with my Sims installations. Sims 2 WILL NOT run unless it is installed to the drive the OS is running off of. I fixed the Sims 2 issues, but when I started working on The Sims 3 I ran into all sorts of issues. It refused to acknowledge the files that were still on the 1TB drive and I found out I would have to reinstall the series with the new OS I was running. That, coupled with Origin's insistence that I buy the Korean version in order to download The Sims 3 games that I already own infuriated me to no end. EA pushed a while back for all Sims players to attach their games to their Origin ID under the guise of allowing their customers to easily download and access the game without any CDs. I'd done this, thinking how nice it would be to no longer need my CDs. However, because Origin region locks based off IP addresses instead of billing/shipping addresses -or allowing their customers to select their own country!- like, oh I don't know, every other online retailer, I was stuck in the Korean realm of Origin and denied access to my North American products. Lucky for me, I still have all of my physical copies of my Sims games.

Let me tell you, installing a base game with all of its expansion and stuff packs via 17+ CDs takes a lot outta you. Not to mention typing in 17 different CD keys and keeping your stack of cases in its perfect, chronologically-organized order while making sure you install each disc to the exact drive you wanted, because boy howdy do CDs like that C: drive!

Now I can successfully play my Sims games, even if Origin doesn't think I own any of them. It's incredibly weird to me how Origin is functioning in all of this. I cannot download any games, but if it's already installed I can play the game. I don't know how it will work when I decide to play The Sims 4, because Sims 4 and onward no longer provides discs with the actual game on it. I have to go through Origin to download the game. I'm thinking today I will go through and see if Origin will recognize my already-installed Sims 4 on D: drive and allow me to play without any problems.

I'm not usually a user of hashtags, but if I were these would describe my entire rant: #expatlifeproblems #firstworldproblems #justletmeplaymyvideogames.

Wednesday and Thursday were pretty laid back days with M. He was off, so we did a little grocery shopping and picked up some Christmas themed household items like dish towels. I've told myself that I'm not allowed to finish decorating until the house is clean again. That little bit of a nudge has gotten me to clean a little more than I've been cleaning lately.

Thursday we also got some good news on that package. I've been tracking the number in USPS every single day and today the tracking updated. The package ended up back in the States! Somehow it never made it off the truck after it was scanned here, so it got rerouted back to the States before it was found again. M and I talked to the post office over here and they say that since nobody at the destination post office put any paperwork on the box saying "return to sender" the package will be sent back over here. So we may open our presents a little late,  but we at least get them! YAY!

Okay, now that it's the end of the week and I've slowly worked on this post over the course of the week some of the specific details of this week have gotten muddied. So I'm going to give general updates.

• I received my Christmas card from Julie! Thank you, Julie!
• I received my Christmas package from Deb! Thank you, Deb, and look for my own version of her much beloved Happy Mail posts!
• We bought a little space heater for the office. We don't want to pay to heat the entire house if we're just trying to keep one room warmer, so that's intended to help. I can run the little heater for 5 minutes and the room will be warm enough to last all day. If we're going to run the floors (I'm going to miss heated floors when we move) we won't bother with the little heater, but if we don't feel the need to heat the rest of the house we use the little heater to make sure the little fluffybutts are doing okay.
• One of my friends, had her hearing for her adoption on Thursday. They will receive their results by the end of the month, but she says it went really well! Yay! I was supposed to go with her but her little nugget had Influenza A and she didn't want me or M to get sick.
• M should receive the results of his sleep study soon! We'll finally know what's wrong!

I think that covers all the major points. I'm a bit bummed out that Blogmas this year isn't going as smoothly as last year, but I'll keep truckin' through and trying! Thanks for sticking with me!